Chapter 47 #3
I show him. Just a few more circles of my fingers and then I’m crying out, leaning forward, my hips seeking and my cunt contracting so hard that it cramps my stomach. The clenches are wet and ecstatic, and I keep chasing my own hand for more.
My eyes are open and on Bell, so I see the moment of rapture, the flexing of his thighs and hips, the rippling tension through his chest, the tormented oblivion on his face. A groan tears from his throat, and his cock begins pumping bursts of seed onto the floor, jerking with each full spurt.
Without being touched, without any friction or pressure at all—simply from watching me—and my orgasm kicks back up at the display in front of me.
Arms spread and bound to the cross, muscles sweat-sheened, abdomen trembling, legs bound together and struggling.
Semen splattered on the floor and his still-dripping cock.
And not once—not while I was sketching or since I sat down on this chair—has he shifted his weight back on his heels. Not once has he rested. He’s stayed in that harrowing position all this time, even through a climax that still has him panting.
We meet eyes, his bled of all desolation and fury, bled of everything really except what I know to be the deepest layers of him—the real him, the him only I’ve seen.
Playful and manipulative and quick. Arrogant enough to fight God, insatiably curious, unbelievably tender.
Diagnosably devoted to me. Pathologically preoccupied with me.
Who imagines a better city and gave me back my art and saved me from the storm and shares so much of the same pain I do.
Who loves me like he’s being crucified with it.
I understand now why he asked me to call him Ry all those years ago—not Ryan, not Bell, not a name that belongs to anyone else. Because this Ryan Bell doesn’t belong to anyone else and never has. Ry is mine alone.
I stand up and pad over to him as I suck my fingers clean. His dick jolts at the sight and begins stiffening again, despite the pools of cum still warm on the floor.
I climb the ladder in nothing but my bra and my unbuttoned shirt until I’m nearly to eye level.
Ry still hasn’t shifted back on his heels, even though he must know any pretense of sketching and studying is long gone.
He shakes in his restraints, curls stuck to his forehead, letting out a low noise as he forces himself to lift his head and look at me.
The sweat and the strain and the ragged exhales, the sharp-edged mouth and sculpted jaw and otherworldly eyes—there is nothing hidden in him right now, every thought and feeling legible, all his beauty lit from without and within, a transubstantiation of fatigue and anguish into love.
Because that’s what I’m looking at right now, a love like God loves. Love like a falling star, flaring and fatal, because God doesn’t only love with hope and belief but with ferocity and obsession, with jealousy and thirst. A love that’s like being crucified—and was, once upon a time.
How strange and how so like God that it was the unfinished angel statue that gave me the determination to live the night of the flood, and now it is the start of another statue with Ry’s face that gives me the determination to love. Or more importantly, to accept it.
I unstrap his ankles, and then I push up on the rung so I can press my lips to his. I taste salt and a little bit of iron, as if he bit himself earlier, and even though he must be wrung out, so exhausted, he kisses me back eagerly, forcing my mouth open so he can taste me, his own wine and myrrh.
I remembered wrong at the gala when I thought Father Brady was telling me to be open to God’s love because that’s not actually what he said, was it?
He said to be open to love, anywhere, any kind of love, because it’s all God’s love in the end, and it’s heartbreaking, dazzling, to feel that openness root in my chest and take to soft, trembling bloom.
Ryan Bell loves me. He’s going to keep loving me. He’s going to keep feeding me waffles and watching me carve and sitting beside me in the church of the God he’s not friendly with. And maybe…maybe there will be a wedding one day. Maybe even children. Why not?
I love him, and there is no fear in love.
Perfect love casts out all fear.
“Yes,” I say into our kiss, pulling back to start unfastening the restraints.
“Yes to what?” he says in a voice that indicates he’s more interested in kissing than talking.
I loosen the other restraint and give him my mouth afterward, which he plunders, now with his hands buried in my hair.
“Yes to whatever comes next,” I say breathlessly, breaking away from his lips. “Yes to you.”
He searches my face intently. “Yes to me?”
“You love me,” I tell him. “Like you’re being crucified.”
“I love you,” he agrees. “Like I’m being crucified.”
“You want forever with me.”
A sinful twinkle comes to his eyes, and the corners of his mouth curl upward. “I want forever with you.”
“So my answer is yes. To love. Yes to our forever.”
And oh, how my devil smiles then.
“Sounds like a deal, Birdie Cooper.”